Scott Paulson could be the love child of Vincent Price. Or should we say Garrison Keillor?

It’s hard to decide. One minute, he slowly hisses creepy lines like, “No, I did not kill off Nancy Drew in last year’s radio drama.” The next, he talks like an amiable farmer who’s inviting you to dinner at Lake Wobegon.

Paulson’s voice is a tool, and that’s only the half of it.

On a recent afternoon, the outreach coordinator at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library was surrounded by the toys, musical instruments, bric-a-brac and junk that he effortlessly uses to create sound effects for old-time radio dramas.

He’s been using those materials and his supple voice to give life to Tom Swift, the fictional inventor-explorer featured in a series of influential science and adventure novels that debuted in 1910. With lots of direction from Paulson, the UCSD Arts Library is celebrating the Tom Swift Centennial through the end of July. And he pulled together actors Friday and Saturday to help perform old-time radio re-enactments of two of the more popular novels: “Tom Swift and His Airship” and “Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X.”

We should probably put an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence. Paulson, 51, leaned into a microphone the other day and, with help from a vocoder, said in a menacing tone, “Tommm Swiffft and the Visitor From Planet X!”

Students sitting at nearby tables in the Geisel Library removed the ear buds connected to their iPods to figure out what on earth was going on.

Paulson’s been doing the voice of several of the novel’s characters, including Chow Winkler and one of the evil Brungarians. (Are there any other kind of Brungarians?)

He’s motivated by simple joy.

“When I perform for people, I want them to say, ‘Hey, I could do that,’ ” Paulson says. “And sometimes they do. People come up and participate. My target audience is people who gave up on music and performance early on because a teacher yelled at them or peers discouraged them.”

Paulson is a veteran musician, working as an orchestral oboist for more than 30 years. But he’s also a devoted “smack-tor,” which is what he calls someone like himself, a sound-effects man who somehow got pushed up to the microphone to speak.

He performs with great skill. Paulson picked up an instrument known as a water phone and used it to re-create some of the eerie sounds from the movies “Friday the 13th” and “The Hunger.” He paused and said, “Oh, and you can use it to create the sound of metal scraping against metal, like in ‘Titanic.’ ” Which he proceeded to do.

He breathed into a plastic slide whistle and made the sound of a steaming teakettle. Then he stuck a small piece of cardboard into the blades of a fan, producing the sound of wood being sawed. He spoke into an empty paint can, turning it into an intercom, of sorts. (Think of Vincent Price’s menacing voice in “The Raven.”)

And he dallied at a theremin, an electronic music device that dates to the 1920s. A person moves his hands in front of two antennas, changing the instrument’s volume, tone and pitch.

Paulson moved his hands with the deftness that Bugs Bunny showed when he portrayed “Leopold Stokowski” in the classic 1948 cartoon, “Long Haired Hare.” He made it sound like flying saucers were landing on the roof of the library. If Paulson had turned to a nearby microphone and used his Vincent Price voice to say, “We’re being invaded,” the place might have cleared out.

Paulson’s script-partner and roommate, Miriam Manning, says, “He’s such great fun. He’ll point out things while we’re watching movies, revealing the tricks that Foley ﻿artists use to enhance a scene. He’ll say, ‘Did you hear the sound of that cricket?’ He’s made me much more aware of the craft involved.

“In these radio dramas, he has a great understanding of what the smallest measurable unit of sound can convey. His degree from UCSD is in linguistics, and I really think that field of study led to his understanding of sound and meaning.”

There’s a bit of irony here. Paulson and his sister Debra became radio-drama enthusiasts in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when TV was emerging as the supreme form of information and entertainment.

Paulson’s father, Paul, was in the Army. When Paulson was very young, the family temporarily moved to Germany. Scott and Debra couldn’t understand the dialogue on TV, since there was no English-language television in Germany at that time. But there was “Voice of America” on the radio. The siblings’ love of radio led them to create their own radio dramas using the reel-to-reel tape machines in their father’s study.

“There were only three themes for our dramas: psycho killers, mad scientists and bad service in a restaurant,” Paulson says. “We really made the psychos sound real. Our parents didn’t know what to think.”

The family later moved to Brewer, Maine, where Paulson watched the popular gothic TV soap opera “Dark Shadows.”

Paulson again channels Vincent Price and says with a low growl: “The show was about vammmmpirres!”

He picked up on the show’s sounds and voices, and, in various ways, has incorporated them into his dramas.

Last year, he produced a live radio re-enactment of a Nancy Drew mystery in honor of his mother, who loved the young female detective. His dad is the inspiration for this year’s re-enactments of Tom Swift.

It’s not clear what comes next. But Paulson has envisioned the ultimate scenario.

“I’d like to be a guy in an orchestra who shows up at a radio station to perform, only there’s no one else there,” he says. “I end up having to do all of the voices and sounds. There’s so many sound effects you could do!”